Unlikely to coach during 2014 season, Wade Phillips is not ready to call it a career

Wade Phillips has resigned himself to that fact there’s very little chance he’ll be coaching in the NFL in 2014 — for just the second season since he broke into the NFL in 1976 — but not for a moment should people think he’s retired.

“Oh, no,” Phillips said Thursday. “I enjoy (coaching) too much. I’m hoping somebody will have a bad defense next season, and I’m sure there will be coaches who get fired. I still think I can help someone. Every place I’ve gone they’ve won, at least in the first year.”

The Texans reached the playoffs for first time in their history in Phillips’ first season as defensive coordinator, 2011, and returned to the postseason in 2012 before collapsing last fall and finishing 2-14, the NFL’s worst record.

Seven head coaches, including the Texans’ Gary Kubiak, were pink-slipped during or after the 2013 season, but none of the new hires gave Phillips an audience except the Texans’ new man, Bill O’Brien, who decided to bring in Romeo Crennel as his defensive coordinator instead.

Phillips said “several” applicants who weren’t successful in landing head-coaching jobs had asked if they could use his name as a potential defensive coordinator when they met with their respective clubs. Presumably one of them was Kubiak, who ultimately landed in Baltimore as the Ravens’ offensive coordinator.

“I’d always coach for Gary if he wanted me,” Phillips said. “I think he’s a great coach and he’ll be a difference-maker in Baltimore. That’s a good fit for him.”

He said he does expect to do some consulting work with some NFL team during OTAs or training camp and it’s possible he might be brought in to troubleshoot during the season or even be retained as “some kind of senior assistant.”

Phillips admitted he gleaned some satisfaction from Seattle’s 43-8 rout of Denver in Super Bowl XLVIII Sunday because of Pete Carroll’s age – 62 – and the fact the Seahawks won this season on the strength of their NFL-best defense.

“It’s not about age. It’s about how good you are as a coach,” the 66-year-old Phillips said. “And was nice to see a team that featured defense be up there. There haven’t too many of those (in recent years).”

However, Phillips admitted the outcome “surprised me. All I had to go on was how good Denver’s offense was all season. They’d about been perfect. But that first play (when the center snap soared over Peyton Manning’s head and gave the Seahawks a safety) affected them more than you might think.

“The thing about the Super Bowl is emotions run higher in that game than any other game. The highs are higher and the lows are lower. If I’m ever in another one, I’ll spend a lot of time warning the players about that, about how important it is to stay on an even keel.”

Phillips was on the wrong end of the worst Super Bowl blowout ever, San Francisco’s 55-10 beating of the Broncos in 1990. He was Denver’s defensive coordinator.

“I remember John Elway’s first pass went straight into the ground when we had a man wide open at our sideline,” he said. “You tell the air just went out of everybody and I saw that (with the Broncos) Sunday.”

Phillips’ first priority going forward is to get settled in the new home he and his wife, Laurie, are having built in the Memorial area. No matter how or where his coaching career continues, they’ll settle in Houston when he does retire. He’d expected that he’d go out with the Texans, but, he noted, “Things don’t always work out like you hope.”